A scholarly video exploring the early work of Richard Diebenkorn. The short documentary is preservation of the artist's beginnings in video format and the first in a new IGTV series, @diebenkornfoundation. Produced on the occasion of Richard Diebenkorn: Paintings and Works on Paper 1946-1952 (March 19 - August 21, 2020), a historical exhibition at Van Doren Waxter in New York devoted to the artist’s stylistic and technical origins and shot on location twice during the early months of the pandemic when the exhibition was closed to the public, the video features interviews with Daisy Murray Holman, Head of Archives at the Richard Diebenkorn Foundation and Rachel Federman, Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Drawings, The Morgan Library & Museum. Together, they ground the viewer in the artist’s early body of work, or as Federman says, "Diebenkorn before Diebenkorn." Murray Holman, who authored the chronology in the artist’s catalogue raisonné of unique works (Yale University Press, 2016) transports the viewer to 1945 when a young Richard Diebenkorn returned from military service to start art school at the San Francisco Art Institute; Federman discusses who has "grappling with this kind of tension between the representational and the nonrepresentational."